Known and Unknown (82 page)

In June 2005, the tours of Khalilzad and Barno were over. Khalilzad was sent to Baghdad to become the new U.S. ambassador there. Five months before Khalilizad's departure, I had asked the President that I be involved in the decision on his replacement. Typically deciding on diplomatic representation was a matter between the White House and the State Department, but to my thinking, Afghanistan was a different matter given the Defense Department's deep involvement there. “We suffered not getting Zal in earlier than we did,” I wrote, referring to the unfortunate selection of Khalilzad's predecessor, a career Foreign Service officer who had had little success in advancing the political process for much of 2002 and 2003. “We need to have someone who can carry [Khalilzad's] level of representation forward without a hitch.”
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For forty-five days after Khalilzad left Kabul for Baghdad, the United States was without an ambassador in Afghanistan. Rice and the State Department eventually announced the selection of Ronald Neumann, a career Foreign Service officer, to replace Khalilzad, without any discussion with the Defense Department. I expressed my displeasure to Steve Hadley.
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In the months after Khalilzad's departure, ominous signs began to appear on the horizon.

 

B
y early 2006, a reorganized Taliban insurgency had emerged in Afghanistan's east and south. Increasing numbers of Taliban fighters traveled into Afghanistan from Pakistan and retreated back across the border whenever coalition forces tried to engage them. It was likely the Taliban would be mounting an offensive in the summer months of 2006 against coalition and Afghan forces.

Disturbed, I asked Dr. Marin Strmecki, an erudite and longtime student of Afghanistan whose previous analysis in the Pentagon's policy shop had impressed me, to return to the country on a fact-finding mission in early spring and report back to me.
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That August, Strmecki briefed me. He didn't sugarcoat anything. The bottom line, he told me, was we faced a “deteriorating security situation” caused by a Taliban escalation and weak or bad governance in southern Afghanistan that created “a vacuum of power into which the enemy moved.”
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The Taliban had in fact created a shadow government in towns across southern Afghanistan. If we did nothing, it was possible that the southern city of Kandahar could return to Taliban control.

I made an effort to get Strmecki's report circulated around the administration and encouraged my colleagues to get his briefing. As I noted in a memo to Vice President Cheney and Steve Hadley, “Given the new level of the insurgency there, [Strmecki] has a new strategy for Afghanistan, which I think merits our careful thought and attention.”
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After four years of relative dormancy, the Taliban was poised to mount a serious offensive. Strmecki's recommendation was that if we were to meet the Taliban's escalation, we needed to mount a counterescalation. It would “not require more U.S. or international military forces but does require new diplomatic initiatives visà-vis Pakistan, renewed energy and urgency in shaping the U.S. partnership with the Afghan government, and more resources for security and development programs,” Strmecki advised.
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The central problem was the sanctuary Pakistan provided for the insurgents. I had repeatedly pressed Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf on the issue. Pakistan's largely autonomous western regions were home to many Islamist radicals, some influential in its government's intelligence organization—the ISI—and the military. The thought of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal falling under the control of Islamist extremists or their terrorist allies was nightmarish.

We were also still working to dispel the suspicions that many Pakistanis and their leaders had about the United States, after our Congress had imposed damaging sanctions on their country in the 1990s. Our job was to rebuild the relationships between our two countries to win Pakistani cooperation against al-Qaida and Islamist terrorists and help reduce their nuclear tensions with India.

We had seen some hopeful signs. We successfully pressured Pakistan to shut down its nuclear proliferation operation run by A. Q. Khan, widely regarded as the father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb. Musharraf's government had been helpful in providing intelligence on senior al-Qaida operatives. With Pakistani intelligence, we often mounted sensitive special operations missions into their territory and conducted UAV drone strikes against terrorist targets. Musharraf had ordered Pakistani forces into western Pakistan to attack Taliban and al-Qaida strongholds and, as a result, lost hundreds of his soldiers.

To be sure, Pakistan was less forthcoming with intelligence on the Taliban networks in the country. Some in the Pakistani intelligence services believed they needed to fund and train the Taliban as a hedge against Indian influence in Afghanistan. Musharraf had made some unhelpful truces and arrangements with governors in western Pakistan, which had the effect of allowing the Taliban to regroup. It was clear by 2006 that the Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan were directly contributing to an insurgency and the destabilization of neighboring Afghanistan.

To blunt the insurgency, I had concluded we needed to expand and accelerate the Afghan National Army well beyond the seventy thousand troops originally planned. Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, the commander who had replaced David Barno, had recommended we cut back the size of the ANA to fifty thousand in the fall of 2005, but we soon reversed the decision. I was disappointed to learn that Eikenberry had moved his military headquarters out of the U.S. embassy in Kabul, reversing the close civil-military linkage that Barno and Khalilzad had forged.

Strmecki recommended we develop a “multi-year COIN [counterinsurgency] plan” utilizing Afghan troops to defend key towns and villages against Taliban infiltration.
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“While the past three years have seen progressive improvements in the counterinsurgency techniques of the Coalition, there are opportunities to undertake additional innovations,” Strmecki wrote.
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Without deploying tens of thousands of U.S. military forces, we could use a parallel structure of civil, nonmilitary support teams to help Afghans stabilize their towns and villages, offering viable livelihoods rather than succumbing to the Taliban. This of course would require yet another effort, building on our earlier attempts, to get other departments and agencies of our federal government to send support teams of civilian experts.

I had sought to increase the NATO alliance's involvement in Afghanistan to lessen the burden on our troops as well. Eventually all of the alliance's forces were placed under one command—the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) led by an American general—to achieve an integrated effort.
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It was a major step for NATO that promised a new relevance for the Alliance in the twenty-first century.

Giving NATO a leading role in Afghanistan was not without its challenges. One was that NATO, though a military alliance, operates as a committee by consensus, and it's difficult to conduct a war by committee. The command arrangements between NATO headquarters in Brussels, ISAF headquarters in Kabul, and the different commanders across the country were complex. NATO military forces were also under widely differing instructions from their home governments. If fired on, some forces could only engage in defensive maneuvers. Though I had hoped that NATO's involvement would bring in more international contributions for Afghan reconstruction, it became a pattern for President Karzai to be promised more assistance than he received from the international community.

Most Afghan ministries were not getting the experts and staff support they needed from the State Department and other U.S. agencies.
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While I respected those who did volunteer to deploy, the staff at the embassy tended to be junior in both age and experience. Moreover, their tours were often too short for them to learn enough to make a substantial contribution. For example, four of the nine political and economic positions in the embassy during Khalilzad's tenure in Afghanistan were left vacant.
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In cabinet meetings I asked all of the departments to expedite sending the people we needed. While there were never enough civilian experts, those who did go to Afghanistan and Iraq contributed greatly to the coalition effort. Nonetheless, military officials complained frequently that other government departments were letting them down. On one occasion, when lawmakers came to the White House to meet with President Bush and the NSC, they inquired about the modest numbers of Foreign Service officers being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. Rice responded that she did not have the power to compel Foreign Service officers to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Secretary of State technically does have the authority to send Foreign Service officers wherever the President deems necessary. However, as Rice pointed out, there was considerable opposition within the career ranks against her using that authority. Military officers expected to be deployed to war zones, which was not the case in our civilian departments or agencies. It was disturbing that we were spending billions of dollars to provide security, but we could not properly staff the U.S. embassy with the needed civilian advisers.

In a meeting on May 26, 2006, President Bush called the NSC together to try to increase civilian support for our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rice updated us on the numbers of Foreign Service officers who were going to Iraq. The number was below what had been expected and well below what had been promised. General Casey, speaking from Iraq on secure video, remarked that the number of diplomats was inadequate.
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Rice, who was unaccustomed to being questioned in front of the President, took issue. “You're out of line, General!” she snapped.
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This was the first time in the nearly six years I had been in the Bush administration that this type of underlying tension between State and Defense had boiled to the surface in an NSC meeting. I told Rice that if she thought a general officer needed calibration, she should tell me and I would attend to it if I agreed.

In the Situation Room, discussion would often turn to which needed to come first: security or the diplomatic and economic tracks. Defense officials sought more political and economic progress. Officials from State would express concerns about the security situation. The reality was that all three—security, diplomacy, and the economy—had to be closely linked. If progress was absent in one, the others would be hindered. But from the Defense Department's standpoint, we knew that while our military would not lose a battle, it was also true that we could not win strategic success by military means alone, particularly in irregular warfare and counterinsurgency.
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Because of the various committee and subcommittee jurisdictions, Congress hampered our ability to engage more non-military support in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our non-military institutions were bound by outdated regulations and statutes, slowed by bureaucratic inertia, and in large measure kept away from the action by a government culture that did not promote and reward individuals willing to deploy abroad.

 

T
here were encouraging signs of progress alongside harbingers that the real fight for Afghanistan's future was yet to come. With an elected government under Karzai, the Afghan people were taking charge of their destiny. NATO was involved with thousands of troops on peacekeeping, security, and reconstruction missions.

At the same time, there was a growing awareness of a threat to the nascent stability we had strived to create. The Taliban had established strongholds in Pakistan. They were quietly infiltrating Afghan towns and villages along the border. Still, my efforts to turn the NSC's attention to Afghanistan in 2006 were only marginally successful, as Afghanistan still seemed to be going reasonably well—at least in contrast to Iraq—and was gaining far less notice in the media.
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Nonetheless, I was concerned that we were missing opportunities to consolidate the successes that had been achieved—missed opportunities that could prove costly later. If left unchallenged, the Taliban could threaten the stability of the region and again welcome terrorists into areas under their control. Given our country's inability to adequately staff the embassy and the civilian support teams to buttress any fragile victories over a new, aggressive Taliban enemy, the glass was looking half empty. As daunting as our challenges in Afghanistan were, by the spring of 2006 Iraq teetered on the edge of something even darker.

B
y the spring of 2006, al-Qaida had seized the initiative in Iraq.Iraqis were not yet ready to stanch the sectarian bloodshed that the Golden Dome mosque bombing had instigated. Terrorists and death squads had gained an advantage in a number of cities. Some 80 percent of terrorist attacks were concentrated in five of the country's eighteen provinces, with a particular focus on Baghdad.
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Insurgents coerced children to don suicide vests and detonate themselves in marketplaces. Uncooperative tribal sheikhs would find their relatives beheaded. Spectacular attacks dominated newscasts across the world. War-weary Iraqis, understandably anxious about their future, expressed frustration with coalition efforts and with the quality of their own political leadership.

Grim stories of violence were prominent in the American media and cast a pall across our country—a pall made all the darker by increasing U.S. casualties. By July 2006, two thousand members of our military had been killed in attacks by the enemy in Iraq—IEDs, ambushes, sniper fire among the most deadly. Another nineteen thousand had suffered combat-related injuries. There was a widespread, if inaccurate, perception in America and around the world that the United States had lost Iraq. A growing number in Congress called for a full-scale reassessment of our strategy in Iraq. Some were trying to end the war by cutting off funds for the troops. Others were moving toward a policy they misleadingly called a “redeployment of forces.” I had heard that euphemism before about Lebanon in 1984. It meant retreat.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the top al-Qaida leader in Iraq, released a series of audiotapes hoping to rally Muslims to his cause. He castigated the United States and Israel. On one tape he claimed credit for the 2003 murder of the UN envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello.
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It was widely believed that he had personally beheaded two Americans who fell into al-Qaida's custody—Nicholas Berg and Eugene Armstrong. The U.S. offered $25 million for information leading to his capture, equal to the price being offered for the capture of bin Laden. Zarqawi had become public enemy number one in Iraq.

When there was every reason for pessimism, it was the determination and commitment of the troops that convinced me that Iraq was not lost to the forces of extremism. Even in the days after the Golden Mosque bombing in Samarra, the troops saw opportunity where many outside observers saw defeat. Samarra forced us to challenge our assumptions about the path we were on. Over the next months, we redoubled our efforts to stabilize the situation and counter the impression our forces might have to withdraw in defeat.

Like the troops under his command, President Bush was not one to quit. His doggedness sometimes could be mistaken for stubbornness, but that tenacity almost singlehandedly avoided the perils associated with the United States losing a major war for a second time in our history. Bush knew time was running out for a successful resolution in Iraq—the American people were losing patience. In one poll, only 44 percent had confidence that we could leave behind a stable Iraqi government. More than 80 percent believed Iraq was engulfed in a civil war.
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Bush was not looking for some face-saving gesture that would allow America to bow out gracefully, as some in the administration were recommending. He did not want to “play for a tie” in Iraq, as he told us periodically. A tie would mean defeat in the long run.

 

I
n one of Zarqawi's blustering audio tapes, the al-Qaida in Iraq leader vowed that “Bush will not enjoy peace of mind and that his army will not have a good life as long as our hearts are beating.”
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In another tape in April 2006, two months after the Samarra mosque bombing, Zarqawi confidently predicted, “The enemy is failing.”
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Six weeks later, the United States military begged to differ.

On June 7, I was in Brussels for NATO ministerial meetings when I was
summoned by an aide for a secure call with General Casey. My first thought was to brace myself for more bad news from Iraq. As I sat in a small communications tent that kept conversations secure, Casey told me that the terrorist we had sought more than anyone else in Iraq was dead.

Two U.S. Air Force F-16s had dropped five-hundred-pound bombs on an al-Qaida safe house near Baqubah. Through a combination of special operations raids, a highly classified signals intelligence operation, and successful interrogations, our Special Forces had zeroed in on the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq.
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We had been closing in on Zarqawi for weeks, and over the previous year had kept the President apprised of the latest developments in our hunt for him.
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Lieutenant General Stan McChrystal, the commander of our special operations forces in Iraq, personally went into the bombed-out building to verify that Zarqawi had in fact been killed.
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McChrystal saw the mortally wounded Zarqawi pulled out of the rubble before he died a short time later. My senior military assistant Vice Admiral Jim Stavridis informed me that we had confirmation of the kill through fingerprinting at the scene.

Zarqawi's death coincided with another piece of good news. After five months of frustrating delays, the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had finally selected a minister of defense and a minister of the interior, the two most important cabinet posts. Zarqawi, perhaps more than anyone, had kept Iraqis from progressing toward a civil society. It was fitting that upon his death the new Iraqi political leadership had taken another key step forward.

With its leader now dead, al-Qaida in Iraq was thrown into a period of confusion as its lieutenants struggled to fill the empty leadership mantle. Attacks seemed to have come to a temporary lull, though we were not under the illusion that the insurgency had permanently abated.

On June 12, the President summoned members of the National Security Council to Camp David to discuss the Iraq strategy for the period ahead. He would be departing for meetings in Baghdad the next day. He properly projected determination in his public statements, but in his private meetings Bush was questioning and probing. It was clear he was concerned about the trend lines in Iraq. So was I.

We were joined in a secure videoconference by the new ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, who had succeeded John Negroponte in Baghdad. While we sorely missed his leadership in Afghanistan, I was pleased to have him in Iraq, where he forged an effective partnership with Casey. In regular videoconferences, Khalilzad kept us apprised of the coalescing government that would be our partner against the insurgency. In our private meetings, however, one could see that Khalilzad and Casey—two individuals not prone to pessimism—were growing weary. The daily cajoling and coaxing of Iraqi officials to take action as their capital city became the epicenter of what was approaching a campaign of ethnic cleansing had taken its toll. The new Iraqi leaders were not feckless or unconcerned about their country—they would agree to approve coalition military actions and robust security measures if prodded. But they weren't George Washingtons either.

A senior public official confronts a test when presented with setbacks in a war. I had seen unconvincing overconfidence from Lyndon Johnson when the Vietnam War started to turn in 1966, and we certainly didn't want to repeat that performance. The President and I saw it as our jobs to balance our concerns with what progress we saw, but without sounding like Pollyanna. If a broad majority in a democracy loses faith in the effort—and there was no mistaking in 2006 that Americans were losing confidence—it cannot be sustained.

As we gathered at Camp David for the June 12 NSC meeting, it was increasingly clear that despite Zarqawi's death, the sectarian strife had not abated and insurgents seemed determined to wage more spectacular attacks. In light of this and the weakening support at home, Bush wanted to discuss any and all available alternatives. I supported that fully.

Abizaid and Casey argued to continue a steady drawdown of our forces. Even after a rise of violence in Iraq that year, their aim was to continue reducing American forces as Iraqi security forces stood up. I too was reluctant to place still more of the burdens in Iraq on Americans rather than on the Iraqis themselves.

Another option discussed at Camp David was the State Department's proposal to draw forces out of Baghdad and major cities, and in effect out of conflict. The idea amounted to letting the sectarian bloodshed work itself out on the theory that American soldiers should not be drawn into an Iraqi civil war. Rice advocated this approach on the grounds that sectarian violence was an Iraqi problem and the Iraqis had to confront it. There was some logic to it, but the State Department approach seemed to be a path toward a staged withdrawal not dissimilar from our departure from Vietnam. There was one important difference: The ascendant Viet Cong and North Vietnamese would not follow us home. If we left Iraq to al-Qaida, we would be certain to have consequences at home with a greater likelihood of terrorist attacks in our cities.

There was another possibility: a counterinsurgency strategy that would put Iraqis in the lead. At the Camp David meeting, we discussed a proposal suggested by Michael Vickers, a former Army Special Forces officer. Vickers had worked for the CIA where he had played a role in arming the Afghan resistance to the Soviet Union.
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Prior to the Camp David meeting, Vickers had prepared a memo for the President. “One of the many paradoxes of modern counterinsurgency,” Vickers wrote, “is that less is often more.” He argued, as Abizaid had, that a successful strategy emphasized intelligence, the “dis-criminate use of force,” a focus on building popular support for the government, protecting the local population, and placing an emphasis on political reconciliation—including amnesty and rehabilitation for insurgents. In contrast, he argued that counterinsurgency strategies that focused on “large-scale sweep and kill-capture operations” without emphasizing building up indigenous capacity to fight the enemy tended to be unsuccessful.

Noting that insurgencies are “protracted contests of wills,” Vickers' paper stated that the problem we had faced over the most recent three years in Iraq was that “we have pursued a direct approach to counterinsurgency that has eroded American public support for the war (our center of gravity) more than it has reduced Iraqi support for the insurgency (our enemy's center of gravity).” As a result, he noted, the insurgency had grown. Increasing force levels, he argued to the President, was “highly unlikely to be decisive.” Insurgents would still control the initiative, and could always temporarily decline to fight. Instead, he considered it “imperative” to shift to an indirect approach, requiring that we “begin and continue the drawdown of U.S. forces while the insurgency is still raging.” Our emphasis, instead, should be on providing “additional resources for Iraqi security forces,” including an increase in U.S. advisers.
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I found the Vickers proposal to be persuasive, including his emphasis on accelerating the pace at which we put Iraqis in the lead. When I had visited with Iraqi officials over the previous months, they told me that the presence of American forces in Iraqi cities had not been helpful and they should be reduced.
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I sent the Vickers memorandum around the Department of Defense to gauge the reactions of key personnel.
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The response was positive. Abizaid expressed a note of caution on troop drawdowns, saying that “the art in all of this is to reduce US forces at a rate that is neither too fast nor too slow.” I forwarded Abizaid's memorandum to the President.
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A
fter the Camp David discussions that June, the President didn't indicate which way he was inclined to go on Iraq. A month later, as sectarian violence increased again, we had another NSC meeting, this time in the White House Roosevelt Room. The mood was downbeat. Khalilzad and Casey had ugly statistics to report.

“The violence is now focused on civilians,” Khalilzad said.

“Death squads were responsible for 230 deaths last week, with 200 in Baghdad alone. The Iraqi government is not enforcing the law against the militias,” Casey added. Over the past month, sixteen hundred bodies, 90 percent believed to be from executions, had been taken to the Baghdad coroner's office.
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Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was seen as giving tacit support to the Shia death squads. Maliki was even lobbying for some of Muqtada al-Sadr's captured lieutenants, known to be responsible for the death squads, to be released from U.S. custody. We declined his request and in fact had directed McChrystal to have U.S. special operations forces target and capture the facilitators of the death squads, some of whom had ties to Iran.

Maliki would be making his first visit to the United States the following week, and it would be a chance for all of us to make clear the gravity of the situation. He needed to understand that if he failed to root out the Shia sectarians that had infiltrated the security forces and upper levels of his government and did not pursue reconciliation with alienated Sunnis, his country would continue to burn. His countrymen had not selected him to watch the country descend into a civil war. History—and the Iraqi electorate—would not be kind to a leader who appeared oblivious to the plight of his people.

President Bush responded, “Last week Maliki was claiming that he wanted to crack down but that U.S. military forces wouldn't let him. If Maliki tries to lay this offon us, it will be an unpleasant visit for him.”
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Maliki knew his claims were untrue. Casey and Abizaid had made clear their desire to pursue the sectarian militias. The obstacle was Maliki's government, which was even considering bringing some of the rogue militias directly into the Iraqi security forces.
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